Adrian's cooking disasters

Episode 1: Beef spare ribs

Welcome to the premiere of Adrian's cooking disasters. In this program you will witness, literally, the thrills and spills of my cooking experiments. Just to give a bit of a background, I have very little experience cooking. What usually happens with meals is one of the following:

a) My brother cooks food;
b) My mother cooks food;
c) My father cooks food (see a pattern start to emerge?);
d) I order something;
e) I heat some pre-cooked meal; or
f) My family eats out

Very rarely do I cook... and when I do, it's usually beef soup, which my mother taught me to cook. (And I must say it's quite good.)

Anyway, enough of the sappy backstory. Let's get to the cooking. Today, there was some really exciting looking beef at the bottom of the fridge. I remembered what it was... it was the remaining beef spare ribs from Sunday that wasn't cooked because there wasn't enough room left in the soup that I was cooking. Anyway, I decided I better cook that before it goes really bad (and hoped that it wasn't already bad). After much deliberation, I also figured that I wouldn't want it just plain... I'd add a little flavour. Red wine.

Stir fry beef spare ribs with onions and red wine

Ingredients:

• Beef spare ribs
• Salt
• Red wine
• Onions

Here's how it's done:

Firstly, chop up beef spare ribs and place them in a bowl. Add a reasonable amount of salt to the beef, whatever you feel comfortable with without making it too salty.

The lovely beef spare ribs

Now for the wine. Take a bottle of red and a corkscrew. Mess up the corking, and run around like a headless chicken trying to figure out how the hell to open it. Start pulling apart the cork, making pieces fly everywhere, and chip the lip of the red wine bottle. Eventually decide to just push the damn cork in. Now you have wine with half a cork and lots of cork fragments in it. Pour a bit of wine into a glass with the use of a drainer to get rid of the bigger cork pieces.

Notice the cork pieces everywhere?

On with the cooking. Take a frying pan, put it above a lit stove, and pour some oil on it. Olive oil should do. After pouring the oil in, start freaking out, repeatedly saying, "oh crap, I think I put too much oil!" Pour the oil out somewhere. Proceed to realise that the flame has gone out, and promptly relight the fire. Start cooking the beef lightly, even though the fire is on medium (switch it to low). When it seems cooked enough, add some chopped onions (you'll probably have to chop them yourself... I was fortunate enough to find some pre-chopped ones in the fridge), then add some red wine. Add too much red wine. Then add some more. Then realise that you've added too much wine, and start repeatedly saying "oh crap, I think I put too much wine in!" Cook until all the wine evaporates, then serve.

Wow, the pan looks relatively okay!


The finished product

The result? Well, the beef itself turned out pretty hard... but surprisingly, the flavour (which was strangely lacking corky goodness) was quite decent. Overall, quite a disastrous cooking experience, fitting for a first entry, but an edible meal. Till next, time... safe cooking.